


The Mic Drop

by luna65



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Missing Scenes, Multi, S3, sad empath noises
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-19 18:58:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4757354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luna65/pseuds/luna65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can't ever take certain things back, you can only survive their echoes and implications.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mic Drop

**Author's Note:**

> Additional scenes and a bit of revision for S3 ep13 and certain elements leading up to it.

**I: some people never come clean**

Reba was a beautiful woman, one of those whose goodness was the same inside and out. It reminded Will of Molly and he was assailed with a need to hold his wife just at that moment. A need for the life he was returning to, not a moment too soon.

Unless.

And as he sat with her and spoke empathetic sentiments which were not lies, even if they appeared vague enough to be generalizations (but no, all too specific, he knew), Will knew he was going to have to enact the scenario of rejection once more. Bedelia had done it, after all, and survived far better than he had. She had no _visible_ scars. But he recalled what she had said to him the first time they met.

"The traumatized are unpredictable because we know we can survive. You can survive this happening to you."

Reba didn't have the luxury of **not** surviving, but Will felt the pain radiating from her, to consider the ruin of Francis Dolarhyde. He wanted to tell her _when a monster decides they will have you, it's not because you called them to your side_. But he figured she knew that, she was a smart, self-possessed woman. And she was kind. Kindness seemed a luxury for most people but for some it was instinctual.

But had he...somehow...called Hannibal to his side? His silence, his seeming indifference, his attempts to retreat as far as he could behind a dark thicket, high in a tower, letting years go by and desolation hold sway. And yet when the letter had come, he trembled so violently to hold it he fell to his knees, silently thankful Molly was on a supply run to town and Walt was in school. And then, instead of burning it instantly as he should have done, he hid it away, needing to be alone with that exquisite script, the weight of the stationary, the aura of politesse emanating from this missive. Something in him broke loose from its mooring with a wrenching cry. Will knew exactly where Hannibal was, and Hannibal proved that because of this specific knowledge he could reach out from the place Will had put him and slip directly into him, as wholly intimate as any penetration he had attempted previously.

In the days which passed between the arrival of the letter and the appearance of Jack Crawford, he would wake up with that bad old feeling of being covered in blood, a familiar situation from a past which was still too close. You could run as far as you liked but your mind came with you.

And for Will, that meant Hannibal was along for the ride.

Everything Reba said, it echoed in him perfectly, like feedback. He couldn't tell her how he knew, but thought she could discern the nuances in his voice well enough to know the truth of his responses. That he wasn't merely attempting to comfort her, but confess a specific knowledge. 

_You live, you learn...if you're lucky._

And despite the aftermath he didn't feel lucky at all.

 

Molly was a rescuer, which Will figured was the only reason why she was able to connect with him. He thought back to when he'd first found Winston on the road to his old house, how he wouldn't give up, he never did when it came to a dog.

Molly's sympathies were far more expansive.

But he kept her away from his darkness, or tried to.

"There are places I can't let you see," he told her. "I swear to you I will be honest and kind and faithful and grateful, but there are some things I can't tell you. You don't want these things in your head. It's bad enough they're in mine."

"Because you have -"

"Surfeit of imagination, if you're being kind. Morbidity, if you're not."

"You're a good man," she said, smiling. "That's all I really need to know. Anything else will come with time."

Sometimes he might have to go chop wood for hours, till his arms ached and his lungs stung with the cold, to focus the echoes of trauma and rage washing up from the depths. Especially when he thought of Muskrat Farm. 

How Will had lied to his rescuer, who had slain the monsters and carried him forth from the underworld. Violence, controlled or otherwise, was always the measure of Hannibal's devotion. Will wanted it to stop - what had been set in motion by his obsession - and knowing it wouldn't unless he made it seem as if he were forcefully pulling apart their _folie a deux_. Hannibal would not let go, ever.

And sometimes he might stop, set down the axe, sit upon the stump he used to split the logs, and drain the poison in sobs which sounded more like the shrieks of an animal caught in a trap.

They hadn't had enough time yet, and they might not ever, even upon returning home. The distance too great in Walt's eyes, the anger too deep in Molly's heart. Never knowing what might next emerge from the woods. Or worse, what was happening in his head...Hannibal's voice had returned and murmured his litanies of possession. Another bloody valentine.

 

 

"You said you didn't want to think about me anymore...but now you want to know _what_ I think. Again."

"A necessary evil, as the saying goes."

"So you've lost the thread? That would be a falsity, Will. It's as easy a path as the one you followed through the catacombs, looking for me. I warned you, didn't I? You can't say I didn't. But you're already standing in the dark, always. It's where I left you."

"And _here_ is where I left you, Dr. Lecter."

 

 

**II: tell me your secrets, I'll tell ya mine**

_Good? No._

Inevitable.

How can you measure the inevitability of divination? Almost resigned not to know what lay at the bottom of that well, but to _see_. That was the greatest temptation he could imagine. To stand before someone in terrible honesty and have them smile back at you because they treasure what you are, all of it, and they _know_. And they _see_.

_He loves me, gloriously broken and plainly unique. A me which no one else will ever want to know._

His heart pounding in time with his head, Will drove back to the motel he chose so that he could save some of his accommodation allotment, noticing there was a bar just up the road. He parked in the lot then walked back, not wanting the company but definitely wanting a Scotch. He was sipping at his second when a classic rock Greek Chorus chided him from the back of the room.

_What kind of love have you got? You should be home but you're not._

_Oh fuck it._ He pulled at his hair and downed the rest of the glass, then gestured for a refill, placing a $20 on the bar.

_But do you **ache** for him?_

He hadn't drunk so much in at least a year, probably longer. He felt that melting around the edges of his consciousness which he recalled from the days where he needed several shots just to begin to think about the possibility of sleep. He now had warmth, and simple pleasures, and real love.

But how **real** was anything, really? When it could be so easily stripped away, obliterated in an instant.

_The prince comes, as he must, to hack away at the thorns, to storm the battlements and climb the tower, and rescue_

This wasn't rescue, this was change, this was manipulation, this was

_the one frozen in time._

revelation.

He drank, and what was he seeking to drown? A fluttering soul, like an ortolan, perhaps? Tricked into endless night to gorge upon regret until bloated and blind meeting its ultimate end in the belly of the beast. But wasn't he there already, never completely digested? Didn't the events of Muskrat Farm replay on a loop no matter how hard he tried to stop it?

But worse, waking up in his own bed, his first sight the face of his savior, and to think: _I could have chosen this and I still might want to._ Even as evil had exhausted him not with its banality, but with its gluttony.

 

When he stumbled back to his motel room, and Francis got the drop on him, Will's only thought before succumbing to unconsciousness was not _save yourself_. He no longer cared to try. His dark bargain was to save those who deserved to be saved, and he was not one of them.

 

Alana was waiting for Will at the entrance when he came to say _please_ , her face set in grim lines, looking as though she hadn't slept.

"There's something I want you to hear," she told him.

Will followed her into the office which retained much of Chilton's urbanity: polished wood and brocade, tasteful accents. She gestured for him to be seated, then clicked her mouse a few times for the desktop which displayed all the security feeds in the facility.

"This was our last conversation," she noted.

He watched the interaction rendered in stark shades of gray, a timestamp running in the bottom margin.

_Every moment since has been borrowed. Your wife...your child...they belong to me._

"Hannibal wasn't really speaking to me when he said that." Alana sounded hoarse, an effort to expel the words.

"Or, _not only_ speaking to you," Will said quietly.

"You **have** to make sure he dies," she asserted. "None of us will survive otherwise."

"Because -"

"He told me a rational society would have killed him already. And he's not wrong about that."

"He saves my life, I take his."

"You've tried to destroy each other so many times -"

"Who's keeping score now, right?" Will laughed, and Alana's eyes went wide.

"Are you **honestly** ready for this?"

_Don't you want to know how it ends?_

"Honestly? No. But I'm resigned. And at this point that's as ready as I need to be."

Will thought of all those ways to wound Hannibal he had tried, knew they had drawn as much blood as he had spilled himself in the course of their friendship. It was defined by change, it was defined by conflict, by the rising action of violence and of manipulation. But he kept thinking of those other moments when his vengeance was transmuted into fascination, and of his dreams. And of that one revelation upon which the world turned.

_What would you do for love? And what wouldn't you do?_

He had thought about it all night, as he felt himself slipping into the darkness, closing his eyes and listening to the voice in his head. It would be a consummate act of love to finally end the story, and he knew he could...Hannibal had told him so, all along.

To take off the mask and let their fingers touch across the void.

Will swallowed down all the words he could not take back, so that he might plead for the grace which love could allow.


End file.
